Fer heaven's sake. It is completely normal in tech support forums for dedicated enthusiasts to haunt the forums habitually, to write dozens or hundreds or thousands of replies to questions, and to be rewarded for their efforts by the software with various privileges. The most obvious and most basic of these is that in many forums you are given a title based on the number of posts you've made. Often, you are also given some sort of gold star, just like in kindergarten, if your posts have frequently been uprated by their readers. And, yes, people who spend a lot of time in a forum and are (on the basis of uprating) highly regarded by other users of that forum can receive privileges and powers as volunteer moderators of the forum. This has been the case since AOL, even since Compuserve, and probably before that, though of course it's rather more automated now.

This poor schmuck Nitecruzr apparently dedicates an enormous amount of time and energy to being helpful, as he sees it, on the Blogger support forums. He's written entire manuals about dealing with problems with Blogger, and from his initial posts in Althouse's thread I'd guess that he has canned helpful responses that he posts when he spots a "my blog has disappeared" thread - heck, he probably does so dozens of times every day.

Were there problems of miscommunication, and some heated words? Sure. But on both sides. This is completely understandable - Althouse had seemingly lost her blog, an apparent loss of such magnitude that anyone could be forgiven shrieking rants and the destruction of furniture. And Nitecruzr is, let us not forget, the sort of person who writes manuals about Blogger and haunts their support forums, for fun and in place of other social interactions.

But the incredible misrepresentations of Nitecruzr's actions, the malicious investigation of their real-world identity, and now the absurd insinuations that they have a relationship with Google beyond the sort seen with volunteer habituates of countless other online forums - all of that is completely unworthy of any self-respecting online community.

So... in turn for google to host your blog for "free", you've got to (1) deal with an outage that spans a couple of days(2) interface with a tool - handle of "nitecruzr" - who has control issues.(3)become orgasmatic when you get finally get near to the level of customer service provided by your cell phone carrier

Not worth it.

Time to pay for legit hosting. While I am pretty much taxed enough, I would be OK with paying a reasonable amount for interesting content.

"Chuck Croll. -AKA nitecruzr - is on "Facebook". What ever that is. My kids are into that. I call it Fsck-book just to be down with it.Nobody wants cool parents."

Everyone's in Facebook. It's not "cool" to be in Facebook. That's like trying to believe it's cool to shop at Target. It's just a normal convenience that everyone knows about and everyone can use. Wake up to reality.

I got that same message [asking for my cell phone number] last evening when I made a comment at Althouse.

But I refused to enter my phone number so I just hit the "continue" button and I got thru the process.

At the time, I viewed it as an innocuous and standard attempt by a business to extract more info from a potential customer. I still do but don't blame some here for thinking it was sinister plot worthy.

Sounds like Google has got some decisions to make about how it operates and what requirements it in fact places on its users, like especially those like our dear blogger Althouse.

The question isn't just Blogger and this disgraceful event, the one that took down Althouse, but instead Google's plan to take over the Universe. I use an Android cell phone and while it's great how long before Google takes a side trip. But who knows where Google goes. Interesting and frustrating too.

Thie event with Althouse is a marker and will do much to show us what Google plans for all of us.

And I've gotten those "verify your account" messages periodically for months. It's Google wanting more data, is all. You don't have to do it to use your account. Let's not get carried away with the conspiracy theories.

nitecruzr, aka Chuck Croll, by another name would be just as foul and odorous too. Maybe this tripe should be called "Mr. Goggle?" Of course, what's his net worth? Oops, does he have a net worth of something greater than slime?

Althouse: Google has got its decisions to make, and so do you regarding where your blog is hosted. Cheers, good luck, and stay alert, for nut cases like nitecruzr really do exist; not just imaginary monsters "under the bed!"

And patterico is finding that too. His Gmail is turned off and he has to jump through hoops to get it reactivated. In the meantime he is out of contact snd can't even retrieve his correspondence. What an arrogant bunch of thugs!

Ann, your best bet is to contacct your US congressman. Google is grossly unresponsive. A call from your congressman's office to Google's Washington office will do wonders. Count on it.

'Everyone's in Facebook. It's not "cool" to be in Facebook. That's like trying to believe it's cool to shop at Target. It's just a normal convenience that everyone knows about and everyone can use. Wake up to reality.'

Professor, once again you're thirty seconds behind reality. FB has jumped the shark. Not everyone needs or deserves a blog about clipping toenails.

I'm late to this discussion, but whatever the reason for the Google/Blogger outage, I'm sorry to see it happened. I've got a fair amount of good insults, condescending comments and brilliant commentary that may have been lost here. But seriously, hope it gets fixed.

And if part of the problem is the ability for unpaid volunteers at Google to mess with Google user accounts for mercurial reasons, that may be the bigger problem that needs to be looked at. And let this be an object lesson in the concept that big government isn't the only institution in society that can make your life unpleasant.

nitecruzr couldn't work for me. An episode like this would get him a visit to my office for counseling, with a letter of reprimand for his permanent personnel file and reassignment to some task where he would no longer interface with customers.

But the root cause seems to be that Google made a change to its software that was significant, but was not adequately tested. Nor did it occur to anyone that to retain adequate backups to support rollback to the configuration prior to the change.

For Cars In Depth I decided to go with Wordpress and host it on my own space that I already pay for at Hostrocket (highly recommended, small company so you actually talk to someone who can solve your problem).

Google is very unresponsive in general. Adsense bots keep coming up with different reasons why I can't sign my site up with them and Google support forums are useless because Google prefers to rely on bots.

Only Patterico gets to decide who is posing racist questions, or picking unfairly on the police, or making death threats, or not. Ask Robert Stacy McCain, Radley Balko, or Jeff Goldstein about that. Who does Google think it is?

You do realize Althouse that this could happen again and again and again right? Just because you get your blog back doesn't mean that you can keep it if the lefty tools keep marking you down as a spam blog.

Frankly I don't like your politics or opinions. I don't care for your voting for Obama and now that it has blown up into a disaster trying to evade responsibility for it. Every conservative spent time and effort telling you what a disaster Obama would be and you ignored them.